"Group style" blind date, directly set the conditions, success or failure can only take three to five minutes...
These young people use "speed dating" in live broadcast rooms to find partners
At present, in order to expand their social scope and "get out of singles" as soon as possible, some single young people choose to enter short video live broadcast rooms. In the live broadcast room, the basic conditions of the blind daters such as height, appearance, occupation, income, house, and car are laid out in the open, and they are evaluated and screened round by round. Some lucky young people have found suitable blind dates here, but others have encountered "routines" and "traps."
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"No. 1, from Jingyuan, Ningxia, 28 years old, owns a car but no house, young entrepreneur; No. 2, from Tianshui, Gansu, 34 years old, owns a house and a car, self-employed..." January 28, 22:50, born in the 1970s Matchmaker Sister Ma repeatedly introduced the basic information of the eight young guests in the live broadcast room. A "group-style" blind date between a matchmaker and eight young male and female guests is taking place on the nine-square screen in the live broadcast room.
According to the rules set by Sister Ma, within 3 minutes, if there is a guest who is interested in a certain young person she is studying, they can apply to join the group chat she set up. They can further obtain the contact information of the other party and enter the one-on-one communication session; if no one is there, After answering, he began to invite the next batch of marriage guests to enter the live broadcast room to join the microphone.
Liu Xinyuan, a 32-year-old woman from Yuanzhou District, Guyuan City, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, met offline and had brief contact with three young men last year, but they failed to develop into romantic relationships. In order to advance important events in her life, she recently started to enter the live broadcast room to find a blind date.
"Information in the live broadcast room is updated very quickly. Whether you can find the right person may only take three to five minutes." Liu Xinyuan said that she has visited more than a dozen blind date live broadcast rooms in the same city, mainly to look at young men. Look, listen to the matchmaker’s introduction, chat more if you’re interested, switch to other blind date live broadcast rooms if you’re not interested.
At present, in order to expand their social scope and "get out of singles" as soon as possible, some single young people choose to enter short video live broadcast rooms. In the live broadcast room, the basic conditions of the blind daters such as height, appearance, occupation, income, house, and car are laid out in the open, and they are evaluated and screened round by round. Some lucky young people have found suitable blind dates here, but others have encountered "routines" and "traps."
For live broadcast blind dates, appearance, expression, and material conditions are the three major considerations.
"I am 32 years old. I work in the oil field in Dingbian, Shaanxi. I have a mortgage on a house in my hometown. I haven't bought a car yet. One of my sisters is married and I have a younger brother who is studying for graduate school."
In the small box in the lower right corner of Lianmai's live broadcast room, a round-faced male guest wearing a black sweater was introducing himself. Liu Xinyuan saw that the background behind the other party was dim lights and a simple dormitory environment. "The other person's job pays well, but the oil field work is hard, so he probably doesn't go home often." Liu Xinyuan speculated.
She wanted to further ask about the other person's career plans, but then she thought, "It's better not to find a job in another place." In the end, she did not interact with the other person.
After graduating from college in 2014, Liu Xinyuan worked as a social worker in a public welfare organization with a monthly salary of nearly 4,000 yuan. She wanted to find a young man of similar age in the same city to discuss marriage.
Matchmaker Sister Ma’s real name is Ma Juan, and she is a housewife born in the 1970s in Guyuan City, Ningxia. Five or six years ago, she worked as an offline matchmaker for some young people. In 2021, considering that young people like to watch short videos, she transferred her matchmaking business to the Internet and started to work as an online matchmaker.
During the day, she sent the collected personal information of young men and women waiting to be married to the short video platform, and also posted some success stories. In the video screen, there were stacks of gift money and a dazzling array of dowry items, with the label "Interested parties please chat privately on WeChat" ". In the evening, she opened a live broadcast room to organize video chats between male and female guests.
In the blind date live broadcast room, the "play methods" she set up include paid one-on-one, and a live broadcast with a matchmaker leading 8 people to show their faces in a row. The specific format is that under her auspices, young male and female guests introduce each other in a short period of ten minutes. Their basic situation, spouse selection requirements, future marriage and childbearing life plans, etc. The entire live broadcast room is open to the public. Those who are not connected to the microphone cannot turn on the beauty filter. Any netizen can click to enter and watch.
Ma Juan told reporters from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily that in her blind date live broadcast room, the male and female guests who joined Lianmai Live Broadcast were mainly between 25 and 28 years old. The male guests have mainly high school or higher vocational education, and are mostly self-employed and working young people with unstable jobs and low incomes. Most of the female guests have better careers and incomes, with college, undergraduate and even postgraduate degrees, and some are in For jobs within the system, some monthly salaries are more than double the local average salary.
According to her observation, there are always more male guests than female guests in Lianmai. In fact, there are often no female guests entering the live broadcast room. Therefore, every time there is a "1 with 8 live broadcast blind date", she will reserve at least two consecutive mic positions for the female guests. "Male guests generally have more patience than female guests. Some people are willing to wait in line for half an hour just for a chance to get on the mic."
When young people enter a live broadcast room for a blind date, appearance, language expression, and material conditions are the three major considerations. "Appearance determines whether the other party is willing to chat, language expression determines the length of chat, and material conditions determine whether we can further contact each other," Ma Juan said.
Ma Juan said with a smile that to be an online matchmaker, you have to be a good "atmosphere team", organize a blind date, try to get 8 male and female guests to participate in the chat, and guide them to talk about the recent weather, recent news, workplace topics, and daily life Insights, etc. "Generally speaking, single young men living in small towns and rural areas tend to have a lower profile if they want to get blind dates with female guests."
Ma Juan always "advises" female guests not to be too "face-conscious" or "money-oriented", and to feel more about the male guests' speech and behavior. She also reminds male guests not to be "socially afraid" and to actively participate in Lianmai chat , show yourself to the female guests.
The "routine" hidden in the blind date live broadcast room
Zhou Xuan, 34, is a grassroots teacher in Deyang City, Sichuan Province. In the past two years, in order to "get out of singles" as soon as possible, she often took the initiative to enter the live broadcast room to find suitable people.
Zhou Xuan discovered that for marriage guests, some blind date live broadcast rooms require ID photos, while others do not have an audit mechanism, so "emotional scammers" will sneak in.
In August last year, Zhou Xuan was satisfied with a young man in the live broadcast room who claimed to be a worker in the system. He took the initiative to contact the matchmaker blogger and added the other party's WeChat account, and kept chatting online for nearly a month.
The other party seemed very sincere at first, and the two chatted very congenially. But what made her feel "almost uncomfortable" was that the other party never took the initiative to invite her to meet offline. She once comforted herself, "Maybe I'm just busy recently."
Until one evening, the man sent a WeChat message to Zhou Xuan, saying that something happened to his friend and he wanted to find her to collect 20,000 yuan.
"I find it very untrustworthy to ask someone of the opposite sex to borrow money without ever meeting them." Although Zhou Xuan felt sorry for the time and emotional cost he had paid, he still rationally cut off contact with the other party.
Two months later, Zhou Xuan paid another matchmaker 100 yuan to participate in a "one-on-one" offline blind date. The meeting place was a borrowed real estate agency reception room, and the meeting lasted less than 20 minutes.
Under the auspices of the matchmaker, Zhou Xuan and the other party introduced each other's basic information such as their place of origin, family, and work, and added each other on WeChat. The 36-year-old man claimed that he had been unmarried because he was too busy at work. His only relationship experience in the past five years was that he "lived with his ex-girlfriend briefly."
Zhou Xuan was dubious about this, and with a cautious attitude, he asked his friends to ask around and found out that in fact, the man divorced in 2021, and his 8-year-old son was raised by his ex-wife.
Zhou Xuan could not accept the other party's deliberate concealment, and quickly broke off contact with the other party. When she mentioned this to the matchmaker blogger, the matchmaker said she had no knowledge of it.
"Everyone can be found in the blind date live broadcast room." Zhou Xuan said that sometimes even though Lian Mai was having a good chat, someone would suddenly join the live broadcast room, and some would not even turn on the camera, just talking about "fringe content."
She also saw a male guest in a blind date live broadcast room where a woman of similar age wearing pajamas suddenly appeared in the camera, but the man argued that she was "his relative."
"What's going on?" "What kind of presence do married people look for in a blind date live broadcast room?" The comment area of the live broadcast room was immediately filled with netizens watching online. Zhou Xuan remembered that in order to maintain order, the matchmaker blogger "invited" the man out of the live broadcast room.
Yang Zhiqing, a post-95 factory youth in Wuzhong City, has been working in a factory for nearly five years. Because of his small life circle and narrow ways to make friends, he often meets friends of the opposite sex through live broadcast rooms. The first time he entered the blind date live broadcast room, "just a few minutes after being connected to the microphone, a female guest asked, 'Have you bought a house, paid in full or mortgaged, and how much gift you are willing to pay if you get married?'".
In November last year, Yang Zhiqing met a young woman from the same city through a blind date live broadcast room. During the three months the two got together, Yang Zhiqing undertook more than 2,000 yuan in offline food, drink and entertainment consumption. But without any warning, the woman suddenly told Yang Zhiqing that she "felt that the two of us were inappropriate and were no longer getting along."
"At that time, we got along with each other as if we were in love, but now that I think about it, something is really wrong." Yang Zhiqing said.
Yang Zhiqing remembers that when he first entered the blind date live broadcast room, a matchmaker blogger not only repeatedly introduced the personal information of male and female marriage guests, but also emphasized: "The matchmaker is only responsible for promoting marriage. It is especially special if conflicts and disputes arise between two people during their offline love and marriage. It involves financial issues and the matchmaker is not responsible.”
Don’t let live blind dates become a profit-seeking gimmick
In April 2022, when the People's Procuratorate of Jiashan County, Zhejiang Province was handling a case in which an anchor and a female guest performed a "double act" in a live broadcast room to defraud a male guest, they identified more than 200 colleagues and female guests involved in the case from behind the suspect. It was discovered that there were loopholes in the dating platform's supervision of the live broadcast room, and prosecutorial recommendations were issued to the dating platform, requiring it to strictly implement management systems such as user registration, anchor management, and report acceptance, and to effectively strengthen positive guidance and standardized management of the online live broadcast industry. , protect the legitimate rights and interests of netizens.
"Obviously, these chaos deviate from the original intention of the blind date live broadcast and do not meet the requirements of a clear cyberspace. The reason lies in the problems of the participants and the failure of platform supervision." Wu Hanhua, a researcher at the People's Data Research Institute of People's Daily Online, suggested that the live broadcast Platforms should strengthen the setting of access thresholds for blind date live broadcast rooms, and strictly control live broadcast matchmakers, blind daters, and onlookers to prevent blind date live broadcast rooms from becoming a place that harbors dirt and evil; they must also ensure the safety of funds to ensure that users Information and privacy are safe so that blind daters have no worries; they should actively accept the joint supervision of all parties, work together, and truly do good things and do practical things. Live blind dates cannot be allowed to become a profit-seeking gimmick, but it is difficult for those who really want to "leave the single" A dream come true.
In order to understand the needs of young people on "cloud dating" for intimacy and love and marriage, Zhang Nannan, a lecturer at the School of Marxism at Central China Normal University and a Ph.D. in Sociology, once interviewed 30 users under the age of 35 in a sub-provincial city about their online dating experiences and practices. Interview.
Zhang Nannan believes that in the traditional way of dating and making friends, young people's emotional relationships gradually shift from ordinary friends to marriage partners. "Cloud Dating" users use the platform as a medium to quickly "encounter" strangers. The matching service provided by the platform on age, family, education, preferences, appearance and other information eliminates the need for young people to explore the basic information of each other when they are in free love. In theory, it helps young people improve the efficiency of mate selection, expand the scope of mate selection, and reduce the cost of mate selection. Information asymmetry in marriage and love.
However, Zhang Nannan reminded that online dating platforms put "youth's marriage and mate selection conditions" in front of them. When some young people choose based on "conditions" on the platform, they will fantasize about finding a "perfect" partner, leading to the pursuit of "perfection". Stuck in the "fast food" of emotions.
Zhang Nannan noticed that many young people currently participating in "cloud dating" are not willing to give their full sincerity in this relationship without reservation. They do not think that this kind of emotional relationship can be equated with intimacy. They keep a certain safe distance from each other, and they will not spend more energy maintaining emotional relationships. "The embedding of man-made and technology has partially replaced the traditional emotional relationship." practice, has an impact on young people’s emotional cognition, which may affect the stability of young people’s marriages.”
Zhang Rui, a doctoral student at the School of Sociology at Beijing Normal University, believes that online youth dating platforms should assume social responsibilities and adjust their matching algorithms to allow a wider range of young users to provide information, rather than only serving those who are considered the "best" in the dating market. Individuals, "We must establish a positive emotional expression and feedback mechanism for young people and create a healthy emotional communication network environment."
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Jiao Minlong Source: China Youth Daily